An Act of Compassion
by Slytherin Awakened
Summary: This is a rewrite of Chapter Twenty-Four: Sectumsempra from Half-Blood Prince. Have you ever wondered what may have happened if a fight hadn't broken out? Read and find out!


_Show me the room that Malfoy is using to do whatever it is he's doing!_ Once again Harry found himself staring at a blank wall. At this point Harry had all but given up on finding out what he was doing in the Room of Requirement, but he always found his thoughts returning to Malfoy when he was alone.

Harry decided to mark today's efforts as another lost cause and retreated to the clockwork of his thoughts as he walked alone down flight after flight of stairs. _I need to find out what Malfoy has been up to all year. But how? The Room won't yield, my friends could care less, and I know Dumbledore needs my full focus... _The thoughts repeated over and over in Harry's head as if if he willed it hard enough, the answer would suddenly come to him.

He was still completely alone, so he decided to pull out his trusted map to check if Malfoy was still in the Room. "I solemnly swear that I am up to no good... or at least Malfoy is." As the parchment came to life filling in the ink likeness of the castle, Harry's eyes scanned the area on the seventh floor where he expected to find him.

Where Harry finally located the boy, however, he would have sworn the map was wrong if he didn't know better. _What's the git doing, trying to open the Chamber of Secrets again?_ To add to the confusion, a tiny dot labeled "Moaning Myrtle" lingered directly next to the dot for to Draco Malfoy.

With blinding curiousity surging through him, Harry raced down to the girl's bathroom on the first floor that had become far too familiar to him in his second year.

Harry silently pushed the bathroom door open and sunk against the adjacent wall. Compared to what he heard now, the initial shock of seeing Malfoy's chosen company on the map seemed like some trivial afterthought.

For the first time in six years Harry heard the callous facade break, shattered into a million glistening pieces, escaping the face of the one he had loathed for so long in small gasps and steadily flowing tears.

Harry strained to retain his cover as the blonde began talking between stifled sobs. "My life depends on it... He chose me!"

For a few silent moments, this thought resonated in Harry's head. Chosen. Marked. Harry suddenly realized just how similar the two were now.

"I have to do it or he'll kill me!"

Harry felt an immense wave of uncontrollable sympathy hit him full-force. Malfoy may have been engulfed by the wrong side, but was the situation not the same? They were both on a mission for their lives.

For the first time since he arrived in the downtrodden bathroom, Harry surrendered his cover to get a glimpse of the boy. He was propped against a bone-white sink which eerily seemed to match the current color of his skin. Harry couldn't see the his face, but he could perfectly sense the smothering feelings of absolute desperation and hopelessness.

Perhaps the most pitiful scene of all was that of Moaning Myrtle attempting to comfort the boy by wrapping her incorporeal, translucent arm around his shoulders to show him that someone understood... someone cared.

Harry didn't know what Malfoy's life depended on, but he knew the person behind it: Voldemort. In the end, sides didn't matter. When Voldemort decided to kill someone, he could care less if it were one of his own Death Eaters or an Order member. The ultimate power that Voldemort lacked was compassion. Love.

Without even thinking about what he was doing, Harry moved from behind the wall and walked forwards. Slowly and meaningfully, he put his arm around the crying boy in a way that he hoped said, "Everything is going to be okay."

After a few shocked seconds that seemed to last forever, the boy stopped crying and retreated into the arms of his comforter. There would be no fighting.

And for that moment, words didn't matter. The past didn't matter. Fate had placed them on opposing sides, but for now there were no sides. There in that bathroom with the boy he swore he'd always hate, all that mattered was the present and Harry's greatest power.

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This was my first submitted fanfic and I really hope you enjoyed it! I did take a few liberties with how it was presented in the book. I decided to change the scene location to the girl's bathroom that Myrtle haunts to accentuate Draco's desperation for a real friend. I only wanted to rewrite this one chapter, but I might put up some different entries... look for them :D


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